If you’re half as cosmopolitan as you pretend to be on weekends, you’ll readily recall (without any memory-jogging hyperlinkage on my part) that Parisian-born electronic/noise artist Felicia Atkinson and San-Fran-based ambient dronesmith/multi-instrumentalist-extraordinaire Jefre Cantu-Ledesma are both enormous badasses. Further, you’ll recall that both kinda KILLED SHIT last year, with Cantu-Ledesma torching us all to cinders on his excellent A Year With 13 moons for the Mexican Summer label, and Atkinson burning-down-the-wind herself with the release of her A Readymade Ceremony album for Shelter Press.
Yeah. Basically, if it were me, I’d be taking shit easy in 2016. But not Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma. Those two overachievers have already hopped up off of any laurels they may have been chilling out on for a second to announce a new collaborative album, Comme Un Seul Narcisse (which, for those of you who aren’t as cosmopolitan as you thought you were earlier, translates to “As a Single Narcissus”). It’s due March 21 on Shelter Press, and according to the classiest press release I’ve ever seen, the album represents an “epistolar conversation of post-modern times” between the two artists, who — oddly enough — only met each other ONCE back in 2009 in San Francisco.
But throughout 2014-2015, the duo reconnected and “exchanged fragments of sounds [and] melodies” back and forth between the Alps and New York City, “composing and building together a new landscape, neither bucolic or urban, a bit aside from nomenclatures or postcard-type apprehension of a site-specific recording.” The resultant 550 limited-edition LP was mastered by Helmut Erler and features photography by John Wiese (after a piece by Atkinson) and design by Bartolomé Sanson. It also attempts to answer such heavy-duty questions as “What is it to wander? What is it to be — as Baudelaire would put it — ‘a flaneur’ from a continent to another?” Yup, you read right: fucking Chuck Baudelaire. In. The. Press. Release.
And speaking of photography and Baudelaire, the album and track titles were apparently “inherited from Susan Sontag’s On Photography, in which she quotes the illimitable French poet: “The flaneur sees himself in the documents and medias he uses and integrates to his own perception, the act of recording becomes again an act of feeling.”
I… don’t even know how to quip after all that, you guys. Check out this collage of the album’s tracks (via FACT):
Comme Un Seul Narcisse tracklisting:
A1. O
A2. B
A3. J
A4. E
A5. TS
B1. ME
B2. LA
B3. NC
B4. OLI
B5. QUES
More about: Félicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
